All Roads Lead to Media Data
Media and entertainment have become a leader in data insights and data generation due to the tectonic shift to streaming of both music and video. As the industry continues to produce more data, the ability to manage and harness its value is more critical than ever.
All roads lead to Rome. The phrase refers to the road infrastructure consisting of 29 major roads that connected all the empire’s 113 provinces. That’s a lot of provinces!
Today, those roads are data, and Media and Entertainment (M&E) is the new Rome. Not only do all roads lead to data, but the product itself is also data, as the customers interact with the product. The rise of streaming content, combined with the explosion of social data, has generated a greater volume and variety of M&E data than in any other industry. Everything from liked photos to watched episodes contributes to this volume and has an inherently high value. But what exactly makes it valuable?
Roman roads were so valuable, in part, because they were conduits of news. All those roads that lead to Rome carried information from every corner of the empire.
Timeliness is everything
Data quality is usually assessed by things like accuracy, relevance, completeness, and timeliness. In today’s world of rapidly changing content trends (who could be bothered with “Making a Murder” after “Tiger King”?), timeliness is king. The window of opportunity is small for marketers and production teams to react to the of-the-moment emotions of their viewers. Retention of a customer could mean displaying the correct offer in front of them after they’ve just finished watching a dramatic series, are caught up in the moment, and want more. Even a day later, that emotion may be gone, taking the desire to sign up for another 30 days of service along with it.
When data quality attributes align, data is at its most valuable. However, preserving that value relies completely on maintaining a stable and flexible technology network, all while M&E data constantly evolves, accruing data by the second. With the right platforms in place, data can produce insights almost as quickly.
High-speed rail: the value of Snowflake
The power to capitalize on the moment lies in the ability to seamlessly consume, analyze, derive insight, and take action. Where the Salesforce platform lets us easily maintain accurate data and use it to market to end consumers, the ability to build complete data — and bring it together rapidly — is where Snowflake really shines. It’s a massive advancement in maintaining data timeliness. If traditional data platforms are the solid stone roads of the Roman empire, Snowflake is a high-speed rail system. That’s why it’s so exciting that it has become easier than ever to move data from Salesforce to Snowflake, and into Tableau (and Tableau CRM for analytic power).
The best data proves its value when visual insights drive action. In M&E, that can take the form of recognizing which tastemakers are driving impressions for video content, and asking them to collaborate on a campaign. Or seeing on a dashboard that a new show is gaining a cult following, and getting the green light for season two.
Why the Tableau dashboard is a game changer
Tableau became a giant in this space with its peerless ability to deliver massive volumes of data, updated and analyzed, in an intuitive, visual format. With its ability to quickly aggregate data and provide interactivity, Tableau dashboards let anyone ask questions about the data and get answers almost instantaneously. If a media marketer wonders why a promotion garnered fewer impressions than anticipated, the dashboard might show that it’s not reaching its target audience on two specific social sites. With that insight, the marketer can ramp up media pushes to increase lagging impressions — which is just one of potentially dozens of critical actions that an M&E team might take every day with the clear insights from their dashboards.
From confusing jumble to clear action
When Salesforce, Tableau, and Snowflake are optimized to work together, they turn vast amounts of unwieldy media data from a jumble into a solid, reliable source of information. They make a line as straight as a Roman road from consumer behavior to data-driven decisions.
